Precedence: bulk
FAIR/Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
January/February 1999
MURDER IN JAVA
Psychological warfare and the New York Times
By Peter Dale Scott
In late 1998, the world watched with concern a sinister wave of
killings against moderate Muslim clerics in East Java, Indonesia. The
killings had the marks of a psychological terror campaign, much like that
waged in 1965 by the Indonesian Army. By its use of "psywar," the Army was
able to kill off its Communist political opposition and at the same time
reinforce a desire for rule by a strongman regime. In that Army campaign at
least 500,000 civilians were killed.
The analogies between 1965 and 1998 are many: the distribution of
death lists to terrify the public, the arrival of assassins in trucks,
mutilation of corpses and display of body parts in public places. This led
observers inside and outside Java to speculate that, once again, Army
elements were fomenting terror to justify a military crackdown. In fact,
Army members have already been arrested by local authorities for the
killings, and then mysteriously released (Singapore Straits Times, 10/30/98).
In the October 20 New York Times, Nicholas Kristof presented an
almost completely backwards analysis of the killings, attributing them not
to the army but to social upheaval in the transition away from military
dictatorship. "With the decline of strongman rule," he wrote, "there seems
to be an increasing willingness to attribute a problem to a sorcerer's
magic--and to settle the problem immediately by picking up a sickle."
FALSE CHRONOLOGY
To support the case that killings began from below, not above,
Kristof supplied a falsified chronology. He wrote that the "killings began
with the slayings of dozens of Muslim leaders," which then led to
retaliations against suspects with alleged "supernatural powers." In fact,
the original victims were traditional sorcerers (dukuns), who are part of
the Javanese culture. Their practice is offensive to sectarian Muslims, but
is tolerated by the clerics of the more moderate Nahdlatul Ulama (NU)
organization. These became targeted after some of them had come to the
sorcerers' aid.
Mob violence only began after killers dressed in black, whom the
public called "ninjas," had killed almost 100 NU clerics, and even thrown
parts of dismembered corpses into mosques (a gesture certain not only to
terrorize but to infuriate). Kristof writes that "the original ninja were
secret Japanese fighters," not mentioning that in Java the term is applied
to killers trained by the ruthless Army Special Forces--now called
Kopassus--who organized the great massacre of 1965.
To quote from a warning distributed by pro-democracy activists in
Jakarta last May, "'Ninja' is the term popularly used to designate the Army
Special Forces (Kopassus) in disguise. Ninjas usually do the killing and
destruction covertly." The warning added that Kopassus started using ninjas
when the U.S.-trained General Prabowo, until this spring a Pentagon golden
boy, was Kopassus commander.
In his article, Kristof accurately reported that many believe the
killings are an extension of those engaged in by "the ruling political
apparatus" in the Suharto era, "either to eliminate Muslim critics or else
to sow chaos and the conditions for a coup." But this language avoided
mentioning the Army. Indeed, the only reference to the army in his
three-column story was as a force entering the area belatedly, "pledged to
solve all the killings."
In short, the Kristof story presents a picture of mob violence
requiring army intervention, where reporters from AsiaWeek (10/31/98) to the
London Sunday Times (10/25/98) have seen yet another covert army
intervention to induce mob violence.
NOSTALGIA FOR ORDER
Much more so than other New York Times reporters, Kristof's stories
on Indonesia have consistently betrayed the same propagandistic bias. This
was his first Indonesia story since last May, when, after anti-Chinese
violence for which Kopassus and its former general Prabowo have been blamed,
Kristof wrote that "new freedoms" were responsible for the ethnic frictions
(5/25/98). And he showed his nostalgia for army rule four days earlier
(5/21/98), when he belittled the student protest movement in Jakarta and
approvingly described the Army as "the institution that used to keep the
passengers in the back seat and maintain order." This was shortly after
exposures of Kopassus atrocities for which General Prabowo was demoted and
eventually fired.
This nostalgia for the Indonesian Army's version of "order" has been
a recurrent feature of New York Times reporting (and misreporting) about
Indonesia in the past. Just as for decades the Army and its U.S.-trained
Kopassus Special Forces were the preferred assets of the CIA and Pentagon,
so were their propaganda campaigns faithfully parroted by the Times.
In 1965, as the Special Forces proceeded to massacre thousands of
Communists and others, the New York Times (10/30/65) repeated the Army claim
that it was Communists who were massacring their enemies. In 1975, seven
weeks after CIA reports that the Indonesian Army had begun fighting overtly
in East Timor, a Times correspondent (11/26/75) wrote of Indonesia's
"hands-off policy with regard to the civil war that is engulfing Portuguese
Timor."
To its credit, some New York Times coverage of Indonesia and East
Timor has recently improved. For example, a story by Seth Mydans (8/25/98)
frankly acknowledged the terroristic military practices which led to the
dismissal of General Prabowo.
But just as Prabowo and Kopassus are still feared in Indonesia as
possible manipulators of the ninja terror campaign, so there still appear to
be those in Washington, and at the New York Times, who wish to remain close
to them.
In November an official fact-finding team in Jakarta accused Prabowo
and other officers of planning for the creation of the May riots at the
"highest decision-making level." But the New York Times (11/4/98),
suppressing Prabowo's name, reported that the team found that "the military
had been effective in controlling the chaos."
Such stories are much worse, and more ominous, than a piece of bad
journalism. They suggest that, once again, the Times has become an
instrument in a psywar campaign to protect state terrorism.***
-----------------------------
Sidebar:
AN INDEX OF MISREPRESENTATION
Through three crucial months in 1965, the New York Times repeated
Indonesian Army propaganda about a Communist-directed terror campaign and
massacre following a failed coup by leftist military officers.
The alleged Communist campaign never existed: "The collapse of the
coup in Jakarta demoralized the leading military conspirators in Central
Java," wrote M.C. Ricklefs in his History of Modern Indonesia. "During the
night of 12 October they withdrew to the Mount Merapi-Merbabu area with two
companies of soldiers. The officers they left behind realized that the cause
was lost and begged forgiveness. Jakarta thus regained control of the region."
Here is the record of the Times' misrepresentation, as summarized in
the Times' own index. The first hint that Communists were, in reality, the
victims of the massacre was published on November 27, 1965.
10/8 : Army seen curbing drive against Communists and heeding Sukarno
plea for unity
10/19 : Mobs reported burning and sacking country
10/25 : Army seen as bulwark against take-over by Communists
10/28 : Army declares martial law in central Java; alleges Communists
massacre civilians there
11/1 : Communist rebels reportedly seize two areas; martial law earlier
imposed and
troops sent in to halt terrorism
11/3 : Communist revolt rapidly spreads from central to E and W Java; 500
rebels battling
11/15 : Communists in central Java, under army pressure broken into
small-scale bands capable
only of small-scale terrorism
11/27 : Roman Catholic newspaper reports 71 Communists captured, many
killed by army troops...
many Catholic youths killed by Communists
12/20 : Singapore sources say Communists planned large-scale terror
campaign if coup succeeded
-----------------------------
--P.D.S.
Sidebar:
THE TIMES AND EAST TIMOR
In 1975, the New York Times (often relying on British sources)
repeated Indonesian Army lies about the new government of East Timor, as
"Communists" (9/14/75) receiving arms from Communist bloc countries
(12/13/75), who in seizing power "had cut the throats of babies" (8/26/75),
and who were violating the Indonesian territory of West Timor (9/27/75).
Former Australian diplomat James Dunn, who was in East Timor at the
time, has since denounced these claims as either "macabre fantasy" or else
fabrications from the Indonesian Army intelligence agency Bakin. (See James
Dunn, Timor.)
Meanwhile, an extraordinary dispatch (11/26/75) from the Times' own
correspondent, David Andelman, spoke of Indonesia's "hands-off policy with
respect to the civil war that is engulfing Portuguese Timor," and noted that
"the Indonesian forces...have been showing remarkable restraint."
This was seven weeks after the Indonesians, as the CIA had reported
internally on October 10, had launched an overt military attack from West
Timor, in order (according to Dunn's Timor) "to keep up the fiction that the
civil war was continuing to rage."***
--P.D.S.
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